Thursday’s webinar Build a Rock Solid Book of Business has been postponed due to a family member’s hospitalization. I’ll send information on the new date as soon as it’s set. (And if you missed the announcement but would like to register, you may do so here .) Without further ado, some articles and ideas you... Continue Reading

Thursday’s webinar Build a Rock Solid Book of Business has been postponed due to a family member’s hospitalization. I’ll send information on the new date as soon as it’s set. (And if you missed the announcement but would like to register, you may do so here .)

Without further ado, some articles and ideas you can use this week:

1. If you work in a firm and struggle to get around to business development activity thanks to the pile of billable work on your desk, read this quote and then internalize it:

“The biggest mistake that you can make is to believe that you are working for somebody else. Job security is gone. The driving force of a career must come from the individual. Remember: Jobs are owned by the company, you own your career!” Earl Nightingale

2. If you think that doing good work on time (you know, just like most of your competitors) is enough to create value, try this exercise to uncover reasons for clients to choose you.

Finally, are you committed to growing your book of business but not sure where to start? I’ve set aside a few consultation times for next week. Schedule a time for us to get acquainted and explore whether I might be able to help you.

Do you ever wonder why the plan that a colleague used to land business just doesn’t seem to work for you? Are you tired of facing a choice between doing billable work (so you have receivables today) and doing business development work (so you have receivables tomorrow)? Have you ever had the feeling that there’s... Continue Reading

Over the last 10 weeks, I’ve serialized the article Nine Ways You’re Losing Business—and What to Do About It. To recap, the nine ways you’re losing business are: You aren’t creating value for your clients. You don’t really see your clients. You’re indistinguishable from other lawyers. You don’t invest in your practice. You don’t know how to... Continue Reading

I shared suggestions on how to address each of these problems in the respective article parts, but there’s a bigger answer. Effective business development lives at the intersection of four factors:

Your practitioner brand (who you are, as demonstrated in the way you approach your practice and your clients, and who you are in terms of marketing)

Who your client is (in terms of demographics, psychographics, and more)

What your client needs (substantively and from the relationship with you)

How you create value for your client

Here’s the question for you: how frequently are you operating in that sweet spot?

It isn’t easy to learn this. Law school doesn’t teach how to hit this sweet spot, and very few business development training opportunities address this level of strategy. Knowing how to find it is critical, however. The alternative—strategic scattershot marketing—leads to frustration and success that’s limited at best.

Next week, I’ll share an invitation to explore this topic with me and (most importantly) begin to identify your unique path to success. For now, study the schematic above and consider where your marketing lives.

Welcome to part 10 of a 10-part series, Nine Ways You’re Losing Business—and What to Do About It. Next week, I’ll summarize the entire series and show you some next steps so that you can go into 2015 from a position of strength instead of trying to play catch-up. Reason No. 9: You’re renting your... Continue Reading

Next week, I’ll summarize the entire series and show you some next steps so that you can go into 2015 from a position of strength instead of trying to play catch-up.

Reason No. 9: You’re renting your practice, not owning it.

Are you renting your practice? I’m not asking whether you’re renting office space. And I’m not asking whether you’re an associate or junior in practice. This question is about your attitude and your approach to your practice. Are you building your practice based on what you want your practice to be, or are you “paying your dues”? Compromising? Accepting what isn’t ideal but might be good enough for now? Waiting until something changes?

If you aren’t actively and strategically growing your practice on a consistent basis, you are renting your practice. Even if you’re a sole practitioner, renting your practice means you have a job, not a career. As we learned during the recession, lawyers can lose their jobs when firms fail or as a stopgap measure designed to avoid failure—or even to increase profit.

“Career” non-equity partners (meaning those who cannot or will not advance to the point of attaining equity partnership, as distinguished from “transitional” non-equity partners who are working to become equity partners) are at special risk. These lawyers typically have strong skills but relatively high salaries and relatively small books of business, meaning that they represent a drag on the firm if work dries up and they can’t bring in enough new work to support or significantly defray their expense.

If you only rent a practice, you have few transferable assets other than skill and experience, which is many cases isn’t enough to distinguish you from a sea of talented lawyers. As a result, you have fewer professional options, and you may find it difficult or even impossible to find a new job.

“Owning” your practice means taking responsibility for your own success and not depending on others to provide work or opportunities to you. It means looking at the assets and liabilities in your practice (financial and otherwise) and determining how to harness the assets so that you can grow your practice. It’s putting in consistent and strategic activity to grow your practice. It’s looking at engagements as relationships, not transactions—even one-off engagements can yield referrals with the appropriate effort.

Renting vs. owning a practice isn’t purely a financial question: depending on the circumstances, a lawyer with no clients at all may own her practice with a lawyer with a $250,000 book of business may only be renting. While results certainly do matter, what distinguishes two similarly situated lawyers is action and attitude. A 2009 New York Times Op-Ed piece summarized it this way:

A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained. They are the new untouchables. . . Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive. (Emphasis added.)

The legal market has shifted, and it will continue to do so. Clients have more options and are making new demands in terms of the cost, efficiency, and structure of engagements, and there’s no hint of abatement. Instead, we can expect to see more changes and more significant changes in the way that lawyers and clients work together.

Today’s economy calls on you to become an entrepreneur at law. Stop following the tired old rainmaker model of getting the work, then doing the work, rinse and repeat with an ever-growing focus on bringing in more and more work. That model, when successful, leads straight into the feast/famine cycle. Instead, determine your brand as a practitioner and how you can express that brand in your practice, then find how your brand and the skills encompassed in that brand can intersect with what reaches and influences your ideal clients. Build relationships based on trust, and look for ways to create value for your clients. Re-imagine how you can work with your clients, letting your clients’ needs and wants guide your innovation.

If you’re doing the same old, same old, you are losing business. The new economy calls on you to take ownership of your practice, to explore new ways to find, engage, and serve your clients, and to seek continuous improvement in what you do as a practitioner and how you do it.

Welcome to part 9 of a 10-part series, Nine Ways You’re Losing Business—and What to Do About It Reason No. 8: You’re marketing your practice using someone else’s plan. Law schools rarely teach students how to market (or manage) a law practice. So most lawyers learn by reading articles, attending training, and—most commonly—following the example... Continue Reading

Law schools rarely teach students how to market (or manage) a law practice. So most lawyers learn by reading articles, attending training, and—most commonly—following the example set by a successful mentor. However, every person brings different skills, assets, and attitudes to both marketing and practice.

If you’re using a plan created by someone who’s significantly different from you, even a plan that’s been highly successful for that person won’t be successful for you. Every person brings a unique set of skills and assets to be used in marketing as well as preferences that must be accommodated, at least to some extent. In addition, every ideal client profile will be slightly different. No two plans will be identical, and even remarkably similar plans will probably be executed in distinct ways.

I once worked with Sarah, a lawyer who had built a thriving practice, and I thought I’d follow her lead so I could get the same results. Unlike me, Sarah was a social butterfly. She entertained frequently and met contacts for a meal or coffee most every day. She seemed to know everyone: when we went out to lunch, I felt as if we were having lunch with the whole restaurant because it seemed that she spoke to almost everyone there. Sarah was well known in the community, she met many potential clients who subsequently hired her, and she had a steady flow of referrals.

I tried to model Sarah’s networking activity. I laid great plans, but I dreaded executing them. Unlike Sarah, I’m an introvert, and the thought of that much socializing was simply exhausting. I made an effort, but it was too easy to get sidetracked with work (pressing or otherwise) because I didn’t enjoy that volume of activity, and so I didn’t get anything remotely close to Sarah’s results. Sarah’s plan worked for her, but it wasn’t a fit for me, and it wasn’t as effective as the plan I created to incorporate my own personality, preferences, and skills.

The “copycat plan” is destined for failure, as is any plan that doesn’t start with an analysis of the building blocks at your disposal and the objectives you want to reach. Instead of borrowing someone else’s plan or using a generic plan prescribed by a marketing expert, create your own plan based on the responses to questions such as:

Who are you as a practitioner? How do you approach your practice and your clients?

What is your marketing identity? What marketing avenues are most effective for that identity?

What are the attributes and characteristics of your target clients, and how can you reach them?

What are your branding assets?

Which relationships should you focus on building?

What are your objectives? (For example, do you need to bring in business immediately, do you need to raise your profile in the marketplace, or do you need to position yourself to support a new or expanded practice area?

Use the answers to these questions to design a plan that’s well suited to your specific objectives, that uses your unique skills, and that’s calculated to reach your ideal clients and your network of allies. When your plan is tailored for you, you’ll find it more effective and you’ll be more willing to implement it on a consistent basis.

If you use a generic business development plan copied from another source, you’re losing business.

Welcome to part 8 of a 10-part series, Nine Ways You’re Losing Business—and What to Do About It. Reason No. 7: You “don’t have time.” Time. That great limiter for every practice. No one has time enough for everything We know this. And yet, some days, doesn’t it feel like you could summarize your task... Continue Reading

Time. That great limiter for every practice. No one has time enough for everything We know this. And yet, some days, doesn’t it feel like you could summarize your task list by writing simply, “EVERYTHING”? You have billable work, admin work, plus a personal life, and you want to add more on top of that?

If you don’t make time to complete business development activities and to create value for your clients, you’re losing business.

The “more” you have to add to your task list includes activity designed to raise your profile in the marketplace, client acquisition, and creating value for your clients above and beyond the billable work you do for them. You might group all of this as business development activity, since it’s designed to bring in and satisfy your clientele. That seems like a tall order, and in some ways it is, but two operating principles can simplify it a bit.

First, you have to find a way to marry your business development work with your billable work. When the two are divorced, as they generally are, you’ll have the sense that you can do only one of those activities, and the billable work will win. That’s how the feast/famine cycle gets started.

When your business development work comes from and through your billable work, you’ll exit the feast/famine cycle. For example, you might find ideas for writing or speaking based on the questions your clients raise, and you might even be able to develop a client memorandum into an article by replacing the elements specific to the client with a fictionalized or generalized description and making some general suggestions based on your discussion and analysis of the issue. You may also ask your clients for referrals and introductions, and inviting current and former clients for a presentation or program that interests them may turn into a quite effective business development activity.

You will need to supplement your business development efforts with activity that is truly separate from your billable work, of course, but when there’s significant overlap between the two aspects of practice maintenance and growth, you’ll make better use of your time. The separate work might include activities such as networking, working within an industry organization, or serving on a board of directors. You will find some nexus between those activities and your practice (otherwise, the activities would not be well-suited to help build your practice), but there’s an unavoidable separation between those activities and your billable work.

The second approach, which must work in tandem with the first, requires you to prioritize everything that you do. Is business development a priority for you? Here, it’s important that you have a business development plan that’s broken down into projects (raising your profile, meeting new referral sources) and tasks (writing an article or a blog post, identifying an organization populated by those who do business with or otherwise influence your clients) so that you have specific action items to prioritize. Trying to prioritize categories of tasks like billable work and business development will be ineffective because you’ll never be able to check either off your task list. But you can check off “Draft Smith MSJ brief” or “Attend IEEE meeting,” and you can prioritize each action based on its urgency and its importance.

Don’t misunderstand this approach as a “woowoo” nice but meaningless idea. While you will have days in which you actually can’t squeeze everything that’s important to you, if you think about what is important—meeting deadlines, returning client calls, eating, sleeping—you’ll find that you generally fit at least some of each important activity into your days over the course of a week.

Which activities are important will vary from day to day, but when it comes to business development activity, you’ll want to be sure that you are active in each of these areas each week or month:

Take a few minutes to examine your task list. (Don’t have one? Create it right now.) Strike anything on your list that is not important. Next, look for ways to incorporate business development activity into your billable work. Add to your list any business development tasks that are important for you and not otherwise included. Each evening, block time for the next day’s tasks, leaving a few blocks of time open for unexpected tasks that need urgent attention. Finally, look at your task list and your calendar, and be sure that you’re incorporating each aspect of business development activity over the course of a month.

If you don’t make the time for client value creation and business development activity on a regular and consistent basis, you’re losing business.

Welcome to part 7 of a 10-part series, Nine Ways You’re Losing Business—and What to Do About It. To view the previous posts in this series, click on the category above titled Nine Reasons You’re Losing Business. Reason No. 6 You’re invisible. How do people find you? Are you visible on your website, in publications (offline and... Continue Reading

Welcome to part 7 of a 10-part series, Nine Ways You’re Losing Business—and What to Do About It. To view the previous posts in this series, click on the category above titled Nine Reasons You’re Losing Business.

Reason No. 6 You’re invisible.

How do people find you? Are you visible on your website, in publications (offline and online), as a speaker named in conference materials, at networking meetings, in organizations relevant to your practice, in community organizations, and/or on social media?

In today’s economy, if you aren’t credibly visible in multiple channels, you’re losing business. Invisible lawyers (I call them the anguished invisible) don’t get as many clients. If you’re invisible, you won’t advance in your firm or your community. You won’t advance in the profession, and you’ll tend to bemoan your bad fortune in marketing and in practice. What you won’t realize is that the root of your troubles lies in your status as a best kept secret. That’s no way to live, and it’s certainly no way to build a viable practice.

To be credibly visible means that you appear in a variety of channels in a way that’s relevant to your practice. In other words, you can be found:

Engaging on social media and sharing references or resources (your own or others’) relevant to your practice area;

Curating content about your practice area or related topics;

Working within an organization that has some nexus with your practice area or the kinds of clients you represent; or

Serving in a leadership role in an organization that has some nexus with your practice area or the kinds of clients you represent.

Must you be active in all of these channels? No. You have to select the channels that fit your marketing identity and are reasonable calculated to reach your ideal clients and referral sources.

Are there other channels in which you might be active? You bet. You could serve on a board of advisors that’s somehow related to your practice. You could testify before Congress on a topic that’s relevant to your practice. You could sponsor an event that has some connection with your practice. The channels in which you might become visible and the ways in which you might appear in those channels are potentially limitless, and they’ll shift over time, especially as technology changes.

If you’re an anguished invisible, here are a few steps you can take today to turn it around:

Join a substantive committee of a local bar association (if you receive referrals from lawyers) or an industry group. Work toward attaining a leadership position, as well as speaking or publishing.

Use LinkedIn to ask and answer questions relevant to your practice. Depending on how you phrase your question, even asking can position you as an expert, and answering allows you to showcase your knowledge and experience. Other forums exist for similar activity, including Quora, which is focused entirely on Q&A.

Develop a list of topics on which you could write or speak and send inquiries to organizations that could offer you a forum. Make sure that the organization is geared to your ideal clients or referral sources to gain real benefit.

Research local radio or television shows (or podcasts) that speak to your audience and pitch an idea for a segment or a show. Don’t expect to start on the hottest show, but if you establish your usefulness as a resource and make a good showing, you’ll likely be able to leverage one appearance to future benefit.

Use the power of video. You can create your own video series (effectively an Internet-based television channel) to give you a forum for discussing whatever is new and important in your field of practice. If you create a descriptive name for your channel, you can create a go-to resource for a small group of people who will be passionately interested in what you’re sharing.

Ask yourself: how visible are you today? Are you visible to the right audiences? (If you suddenly win the lottery, you’ll be visible, but you won’t be credibly visible because you won’t appear in a practice-related capacity to those who might hire you or send you referrals.) If you’re unhappy with your answer, start creating your plan now to raise your profile in the marketplace.

Welcome to part 6 of a 10-part series, Nine Ways You’re Losing Business—and What to Do About It. To view the previous posts in this series, click on the category above titled Nine Reasons You’re Losing Business. Reason No. 5 You’re Losing Business: You don’t know how to say no. If you don’t have firm guidelines that... Continue Reading

Welcome to part 6 of a 10-part series, Nine Ways You’re Losing Business—and What to Do About It.To view the previous posts in this series, click on the category above titled Nine Reasons You’re Losing Business.

Reason No. 5 You’re Losing Business:
You don’t know how to say no.

If you don’t have firm guidelines that help you determine which opportunities to accept and which to decline, you’re losing business. That’s true on two levels.

1. Saying yes to one opportunity always means, as a matter of inarguable fact, saying no to something else. Accepting Client A means that you may not have bandwidth available when Client D comes along (or that, if you accept Client D, that time pressures may reduce the quality of your work product or client service). Taking on a leadership role with one organization means that, at least for the time being, you won’t be able to seek a leadership position with another. And choosing to write three articles that will appear before your ideal clients may mean that you’ll have to give up a few hours of sleep.

Choosing to grab one opportunity and let another go for now may be a wise decision or a foolish one. Only by being clear on your objectives can you know which is which. For instance, if you’re accepting a leadership position in a group that’s populated by your ideal clients or referral sources, even giving up a similar opportunity may make sense—unless activity with the second group would deliver an equivalent result with less of a time commitment.

That’s why it’s so important to create a business development plan and to track your activity against it on a regular basis. Your plan will let you weigh an opportunity against your objectives as well as against other opportunities, known and unknown. If you accept an opportunity without due consideration or just because it seems like a good idea and you don’t have anything else planned runs a high risk of getting you sidetracked.

2. Accepting a troublesome client or an issue that is not a good fit for your practice will get you business in the short term, but it likely will cost you business in the longer term. Agreeing to work with a client means that you’re accepting that client’s matter, that client’s foibles and habits, and all of the problems that accompany the client and the matter. When the fit is good between you and a client, that’s fine.

However, when the client is overly demanding or unresponsive or belligerent or when the matter is itself problematic, you can create a time-consuming and a frustrating bog for yourself. Many matters will include bumps and moments of frustration along the way. When you get wrapped up in a matter with more than its share of problems, your attention will be diverted from other matters and other clients.

Before you ask for the business, you must always consider whether you want the business. If you don’t want the business, you must be able to say no.

As difficult as it may be to take on an opportunity or client that isn’t a good fit for you, the real loss is in the work that you could have done instead. Let your business development plan be your guide.

Welcome to part 5 of a 10-part series, Nine Ways You’re Losing Business—and What to Do About It. To view the previous posts in this series, click on the category above titled Nine Reasons You’re Losing Business. Reason No. 4 You’re Losing Business: You don’t invest in your practice. When I was growing up, I... Continue Reading

Welcome to part 5 of a 10-part series, Nine Ways You’re Losing Business—and What to Do About It. To view the previous posts in this series, click on the category above titled Nine Reasons You’re Losing Business.

When I was growing up, I loved a Kingston Trio song called Desert Pete, which taught me the concept of priming a water pump, or using a precious resource (water in this case) to produce more of it. The song’s narrator describes his reluctance to pour water into the pump when he’s so thirsty, but taking that leap of faith pays off.Unsuccessful lawyers resist investing time and money into business development; successful lawyers understand that it takes money to make money and that a practice can never grow without a significant investment of both time and money. If you don’t get this lesson—if you’re tight-fisted with time and money even when using it well would lead to more and better business—you’re losing business.

It costs thousands (and thousands and thousands) of dollars and unimaginable amounts of time to become a lawyer. That education is an investment that can pay off handsomely, though law school is no longer viewed as an easy decision or a certain career path thanks to recession-era changes in the job market and in the perceived value of a law degree.

However, your investment doesn’t end on receipt of your law degree. You know about ordinary business expenses and CLE credits, but how do you look at investments required for client service and business development purposes? In fact, do you see investments, or do you only see expenses?

You’ll need to make investments of both time and money in several categories to grow a thriving practice:/strong>

Business development activity:Whether it’s purchasing holiday cards and writing a short note in each, paying for membership in an organization and attending meetings, or hiring someone to do SEO on your website, you’ll need to invest to grow your practice.

Business and business development education: Law schools should offer foundational classes in business management and business development, because every lawyer needs to understand those two topics. However, such classes are still infrequent. Accordingly, you’ll need to invest time and money in learning what you should have been taught in law school. Even when you get past the foundational level, continued growth requires deeper education.

Technology and infrastructure for client acquisition and service: Technology of all kinds, from an iPad to a client relationship management system, can be useful as you seek ways to expand your practice and to better serve your clients.

To make smart spending decisions, use this process.

Determine an annual budget for your spending. Depending on your practice setting, this budget might be set by the firm that employs you, or you might have to decide how much of your own income you’re willing to invest. Lawyers who skip this step either overspend or underspend, and each will negatively impact the business that is your practice. If your firm provides a budget for you, be sure it’s sufficient to meet your needs.

Evaluate your potential expenditure to determine whether it’s a cost or investment. No matter how promising or enjoyable, an expenditure that doesn’t produce results is a cost, not an investment. Read this blog post to learn how to make the call.

Be sure that you include a line item for education in your budget. Business development education can include attending workshops and conferences, hiring a consultant, purchasing books, and more. Especially when you can get individual feedback and assistance, you’ll find that investing in education will help you to grow much faster than you would if you work alone. And continued investments will help you increase the level of sophistication in your business development work.

Be sure to track your activity and results and review your process on a regular basis. When you do so, you’re able to make evidence-based decisions to stop activities that aren’t working and to continue or even expand the activities that are working.

Know the average lifetime value of a client so you can make smart decisions. Should you spend $25,000 for consulting or an SEO consultant if you can expect (conservatively) to gain one new client as a result? If your average client value is $5000, absolutely not; if your average client value is $75,000, you should make that investment in a heartbeat.

While each of these questions pertains to money, you should make the same evaluation to determine where to spend your time and energy.

How do you make decisions on your business development budget? If you don’t have one yet, start today. When you make smart spending decisions, you increase your chances of rapidly growing your practice.

Welcome to part 4 of a 10-part series, Nine Ways You’re Losing Business—and What to Do About It. To view the previous posts in this series, click on the category above titled “Nine Reasons You’re Losing Business“.

Very often, clients view one lawyer as essentially indistinguishable from another in the same area of practice. Especially for legally unsophisticated clients, a lawyer is a lawyer is a lawyer, and as long as she can handle the matter for the client and she “looks” ok—decent website, decent biographical sketch, decent office and staff—the assumption is that the lawyer will be adequate to meet the need. Even for more sophisticated clients who regularly hire lawyers, it can be difficult to find meaningful distinctions between competitors.

You have a way of approaching your practice and your clients that is partly innate and partly developed over the course of your practice. I call this your Attorney Avatar. I’ve identified six Attorney Avatars that describe practitioners: the Personality, the Partner, the Prophet, the Guru, the Guide, and the Gun. Each carries unique attributes and strengths and defines certain areas that will require attention to build a strong practice.

When you understand who you are as a practitioner, you can develop your attributes and characteristics to create a specific and systemized experience that you create for clients and potential clients. Of course, you must marry your clients’ needs with your own approach to practice, but when you keep both in mind you’ll create an experience that is unique to you because it’s driven by your attitudes and beliefs about what makes for a good practice and a good practitioner.

When you combine your Attorney Avatar with your Marketing Identity, which describes your natural skills and tendencies in the way you approach marketing, you design an initial experience that carries from the first moment a potential client encounters you (whether that’s via an article you’ve written, a presentation you’ve delivered, a visit to your website, or a personal meeting) throughout the course of the relationship.

The client experience can include everything from relations to education to recognition. Ask yourself, what impression would you like a client to have on first encountering you and your practice? How would you communicate that? What do you need to communicate to your client to orient him into your practice? What does your client need to know about the process of his matter and how to work with you? Everything you do, intentional or otherwise, creates a client experience.

When you know your Attorney Avatar (are you, for example, a Partner who focuses on client collaboration or a Gun who tends to have a high volume practice marked by specific processes and procedures to keep matters moving?), you have information that allows you to design a client experience in so doing to distinguish yourself from other practitioners. Ask yourself these questions to help you get a handle on this:

How do you approach your clients and your practice?

Do you have particular skills or experience that’s valuable to clients?

Do you offer extra resources that help your clients?

Do you have an unusual and effective approach to your practice?

What non-legal steps do you take to orient your clients into your practice?

How do you (or how should you) help clients understand how their matters will proceed?

When you know your clients and you know yourself, you can see not just what to bring forward to get and keep the business, but also how to do it. If you have useful experience, for example, the way you present it can significantly affect how a potential client will perceive that experience.

Knowing your Attorney Avatar and using it to create a unique client experience will help you to distinguish yourself from other lawyers. If you fail to do this, you will lose business.